DdCno1
@DdCno1@beehaw.org
- Comment on 9 hours ago:
Yup. Noticed this with plenty of “fans” opening thread after thread of hateful drivel on Steam forums, e.g. for Paralives. These people are clearly not interested in the game. Some even confessed to having been incited by alt-right streamers.
- Comment on The Steam Frame Is More Than Just Another VR Headset - Aftermath (Chris Person) 1 week ago:
Thanks for the info, I wasn’t up to date on Linux support.
- Comment on The Steam Frame Is More Than Just Another VR Headset - Aftermath (Chris Person) 1 week ago:
If you want to dip your toes in VR (and have a Windows PC), get a used WMR headset. As mentioned in my other comment, a former Microsoft engineer made these usable again by releasing a custom driver after official support was removed from Windows.
These headsets all have high-res displays (perfect for flight sims and sim racing - you can easily read instrument panels), even the cheapest ones - and some higher-end models come with excellent OLED panels. Hardware requirements are very low and most PCVR games work just fine out of the box. Setup is incredibly quick and easy, with just a single cable with HDMI and USB at the other end (you also need a decent Bluetooth-adapter for the controllers). You can get one of these headsets - they were produced by a variety of manufacturers under license - connected and running in less than five minutes, including defining the borders of your play area. There’s no breakout box, no adapters, no external trackers or additional power supplies.
Their main disadvantage are the somewhat clunky controllers that rely on camera-based tracking in combination with built-in sensors. Fine for quick movements everywhere and precise movements in front of the cameras, but the tracking is nowhere near as reliable as on more expensive or newer headsets (expect to briefly - a second or less - lose tracking about once every three or four hours of playing). It’s still more than good enough for pretty much every VR game though, including the likes of Beat Saber, HL Alyx, competitive VR shooters, Skyrim VR (probably the best VR game there is), etc.
Controllers use standard AA batteries, by the way, which means there are no old and decaying built-in batteries to worry about. I’d get rechargeable ones.
Prices were incredibly low already compared to other headsets when they were new. Used - since most consider them obsolete after the official loss of support - they are a bargain. You can find a working Lenovo Explorer with controllers (the cheapest recommended option) for less than 100 bucks, easy. A fancier headset, like the Samsung Odyssey+ with its gorgeous OLED panel, can be had for maybe 20 or 30 bucks more. Do not buy these without controllers.
I would not claim that WMR headsets are or ever were the best there is in terms of VR hardware, but if you’re just curious and want to get a taste of it and if you then want to casually play the occasional VR game, they are more than good enough for that.
Really important: DO NOT, under any circumstances, use the hinge to flip up the headset. The hinge is a weak point shared by all of these and it WILL break. Just take the entire headset off if you need to look around. Takes just as long and won’t damage the fragile plastic hinge. Otherwise, these are very robust. I’ve smashed the controllers into walls, furniture and an unsuspecting family member without damaging them (and I’ve also bumped into stuff with the headset when I foolishly turned off boundaries - nothing happened).
- Comment on The Steam Frame Is More Than Just Another VR Headset - Aftermath (Chris Person) 1 week ago:
Happy to help!
- Comment on The Steam Frame Is More Than Just Another VR Headset - Aftermath (Chris Person) 1 week ago:
All of them. Here’s the driver:
…steampowered.com/…/Oasis_Driver_for_Windows_Mixe…
Really the only downside is that Intel GPUs don’t work. I modified the driver of my laptop’s underpowered iGPU back in the day to get my Lenovo Explorer to work on it (just barely).
- Comment on The Steam Frame Is More Than Just Another VR Headset - Aftermath (Chris Person) 1 week ago:
Eh? I expected it to be in roughly the same price range as the Index and I don’t think that’s unreasonable for a high-end device.
- Comment on The Steam Frame Is More Than Just Another VR Headset - Aftermath (Chris Person) 1 week ago:
In case you still have it laying around, a former Microsoft engineer released a free driver to Steam that makes these usable again, despite Windows having dropped support. It’ll get installed automatically the moment you connect it to your computer.
- Comment on Valve Adds "Big Art Mode" to Steam, Following Its Popularity in Third-Party Decky Loader Utility 1 week ago:
If you have a higher-end phone, you can likely connect it to a screen with an adapter or a docking station.
- Comment on Valve Adds "Big Art Mode" to Steam, Following Its Popularity in Third-Party Decky Loader Utility 1 week ago:
You can emulate most of the series on a phone these days though.
- Comment on Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of September 1 3 weeks ago:
FTL: Faster Than Light is consuming any moment of free time I have right now, this time with the Multiverse mod. The base game is already quite challenging, the Captain’s Edition Mod I was playing the last time around is several times harder, but this is once again even more demanding on the player.
The amount of variety and quality of the ships is immense, with some of them being so different from what is the norm in the game that they almost feel like games of their own. Unlocking a new ship is an occasion and you never know what you’re getting into. This inevitably leads to the game being unbalanced though, but I feel like this is intentional; certain ships are definitely designed to be especially challenging. Similarly, there are new items that can totally transform existing ships.
Even after dozens and dozens of hours with this mod, it’s constantly throwing new curveballs at me in the form of radically new encounters and insane story ideas. While the writing is often more than overly wordy and self-indulgent (it takes one to know one), there is a wicked sense of humor underneath, even if it can be crude at times. It could do with an editor or ten reigning in the writers though.
Still, I can’t recommend it enough to veteran players of the game looking for an actual challenge after having learned to blaze through the base game and less difficult mods - although chances are, if you’re a veteran FTL captain, you’ve likely already played this mod anyway. I’m just late to the party.
- Comment on Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of September 1 3 weeks ago:
It’s a good game. Definitely overly hated among outrage-hungry “gamers”. Lovely worldbuilding, excellent quests and random encounters, fun combat. Looks great too apart from characters and facial animations. It’s cozy sci-fi, quite different from the usual cynicism and darkness that is so overwhelming now in gaming.
- Comment on Microsoft Paint and Photos Embed Server-Issued GUIDs as Invisible Watermarks in Locally-Generated Images 3 weeks ago:
There is no widespread migration of desktop users from Windows to Linux and I doubt there ever will be. Can we finally bury this delusional idea? It’s far more likely that the desktop PC dies almost completely as a device category used by anyone but professionals and a tiny minority of enthusiasts than for this to happen.
- Comment on AI agents meant to replace Meta workers made “large-scale, disruptive actions” 3 weeks ago:
AI is more like 50% right on a good day though. The user was obviously speaking in hypotheticals.
- Comment on Sony Reminds PS Users They Don't Own Digital Games 4 weeks ago:
Except for the recent Nazi email affair, which immediately makes them not awesome.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
I’ve worked for an org where Firefox with uBlock Origin were standard for everyone. They knew what they were doing.
- Comment on Meta Caught Paying Nazis to Post on Facebook 1 month ago:
The disadvantage is that this is the first time I’ve heard of Friendica (and I usually hear about these kinds of things much earlier).
- Comment on A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months 1 month ago:
Is that a thing in Canada?
- Comment on Five tech giants are hiding $1.65tn in AI debt, using the trick that toppled Enron 1 month ago:
You can talk to me directly instead of behind my back, you know?
I’m not ignoring the international division of labor. Every country is part of it and every country has been part of it in the past, including Socialist ones.
- Comment on Five tech giants are hiding $1.65tn in AI debt, using the trick that toppled Enron 1 month ago:
I have a hunch you took this personally. Nah, I must be hallucinating.
socialists are even worse than capitalist
Their historic record is considerably worse. I don’t even need to bring up gulags, mass starvation and the abysmal living and human rights conditions of every Socialist regime throughout history to support this point (but it doesn’t hurt).
This does not mean that pure capitalism is fine either (I used to consider myself a smug and enlightened centrist - can you tell?), but it tends to work the best with a fair bit of socialism injected in key areas (social safety net, high taxes on wealth, strong regulations and institutions, robust democratic decision making, lots of economic freedom and high social mobility), as in the Nordic model, which is arguably the best thing humans have come up with so far.
extremely inefficient chip production collapsed Soviet Union economy
I didn’t say that, but it was definitely a strongly contributing factor. I mentioned East Germany in particular, since it spent a fortune on setting up a competitive chip industry to achieve parity with Western and Japanese companies, but failed. The debacle that was their infamous 1 MBit chip, which cost 1 Billion Ostmark to develop (at a time when the country was struggling with high debts it owed to West Germany), but never achieved more than 20% yields in pre-production and was never production-ready illustrates just how hopeless the endeavor was. By the time the chip was in said pre-production state, Japan was already producing 4 MBit chips en masse, at economic yields, of course. I can’t find the numbers on how much of the state budget went into this, but it was a considerable portion, at the cost of everything else. Literally their hail Mary.
Ironically, these investments did pay off in the long run, just not for them: The area where the East German government concentrated its chip production is now known as the German silicon valley. Investments into education and research in particular laid the groundwork for the current and very competitive market-driven chip industry and other IT companies that have settled there.
current-day tech giants as desperate today in attempt to save “their economic system” as Soviet Union and East Germany were in '70s and '80s?
No. Current-day tech giants are in search of something that promises them more perpetual growth in a finite world, where almost all viable technological niches are already saturated. Smartphones are a solved issue: Everyone has settled on glass rectangles with high-res touchscreens, the hardware and software for them is so mature that even ten year old devices are still sufficient today. Gimmicks like foldables are expected to remain fringe. Same with conventional PCs and laptops: Times when a device was obsolete after four years or sooner are long over. Cloud services and virtualization have similarly reached their peak, to the point that there’s a counter movement back towards local IT.
All of this means that easy avenues for more growth are already clogged up, so after some brief excursions into crypto and NFT, earlier and much smaller bubbles, it’s AI with its promise to replace costly human white collar labor with cheaper software that doesn’t talk back, doesn’t form unions or have uppity ideas about redistributing wealth or getting rid of greedy CEOs. Digital slaves, if you will, ideally as intelligent or more intelligent than humans, but without any ability to shape its own destiny. It’s not happening, of course, just as delusional as trying to automate yourself out of the inherent issues of centrally planned economies, but everyone needs to pretend that it might one day, because their livelihoods depend on it. They have invested too much, are in too deep to pull out, are afraid that if one of them does, the house of cards comes crashing down.
I will not pretend that any of this is particularly insightful, but since you appeared to have struggled with the historic parallels, I thought I’d elaborate on each point a little. I hope this doesn’t cause you any additional pain, but if it does, you should be able to deal with it as a strong, rugged Socialist individual used to hardships in service of a better future. No pain, no glorious workers’ and peasants’ revolution, am I right?
- Comment on Five tech giants are hiding $1.65tn in AI debt, using the trick that toppled Enron 1 month ago:
How does a defensive alliance restrict economic systems?
- Comment on Five tech giants are hiding $1.65tn in AI debt, using the trick that toppled Enron 1 month ago:
Given your username and where it’s registered, you will not like the answer, but: Socialists were also notorious for cooking the books to hide their failures, even more so than dirty capitalist pigs. It’s one of the reasons why the system failed.
This doesn’t make the AI bubble okay, of course. I’m only writing this, because your smug comment combined with your user name are particularly ironic.
Another thing: Had LLMs like we have them now been available in the '70s and '80s, the likes of East Germany and the Soviet Union would have been all over them in a desperate bid to save their economic system, just like they tried to with computerized planning and automation back then, wasting ridiculous and economically ruinous amounts of resources on extremely inefficient chip production before they collapsed. In a way, current-day tech giants and the corporate world in general are repeating this mistake in a desperate bid to tasks part in the “next big thing” to get out of the stagnation they found themselves in.
Call it history repeating itself or rhyming - either way, I’m noticing some patterns here.
- Comment on Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered an in-person final; scores fell 50% 2 months ago:
There was also a background check involved, which I forgot to mention. But overall, it’s very much the former and not even close to something like the latter.
- Comment on Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered an in-person final; scores fell 50% 2 months ago:
Not even that these days. The good jobs are for people with connections. Those who made it through based on merit are more likely to end up as office drones that can be let go if the CEO wants a higher quarterly bonus to spend on gold trim for his third yacht.
- Comment on Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered an in-person final; scores fell 50% 2 months ago:
I was hired during the pandemic and it was quite an interesting experience to get there. They had an online assessment center, several hours (with breaks) of all sorts of quizzes, questions and tasks, mostly intelligence and memory-related, combined with math, general knowledge, language proficiency and a section on personality and personal preferences, with a relatively limited focus on IT questions at the end that felt tacked on for the job. There was no surveillance during it - no webcam requirements or anything. They just sent me a link and I could complete this timed test at a point in time of my choosing, in one go. Since it wasn’t very difficult at all and there was more than enough time, I had no issues with this one.
Before the interview, I was handed a 20 minute condensed version of largely the same type of questions to be completed in person (very small room, alone, under supervision, to eliminate any possibility of cheating), which I completed in no time, and finally an extensive interview (IIRC about 45 minutes) in front of what I can only describe as a tribunal of eight more or less relevant people sitting in a half-circle in front of a chair for the interviewee (at a distance due to COVID), most of which would just silently judge me with their eyes and take down notes as two to three of them switched between interrogating, I mean, interviewing me. They were actually very friendly, but it did feel quite intense. I was extremely nervous in the beginning, even stuttered a little, but as the interview went on, my nerves calmed down. None of the questions were surprising nor upsetting, but due to my initial nervousness, I still felt like I had failed.
Anyway, after they had hired me (I received a call about two weeks later), they later told me that they had done this twice with about 100 applicants each, just to hire a single person. In retrospect, I can’t believe I successfully made it through all of this. I was very well prepared for the interview and had previously spent a lot of effort (several weeks worth) on the application itself, tailoring it to the job and the organization, but still.
If you have the amount of resources this large org has, I think this is a very thorough way of doing things. The simple method of repeating a portion of the test in person (with different questions, but the same kind as online) eliminates cheaters and can be done by an org of virtually any size. The lengthy interview in front of a diverse group I’m not so sure about though. With shy and nervous applicants (as well as those on the spectrum), this can be very overwhelming, but since they all have to find a consensus in the end, discrimination and personal preferences influencing the hiring decision are less likely to happen.
- Comment on The incredible shrinking Xbox: Five studios, 3,200 employees let go 2 months ago:
There are multiple reports stating that id software has been hit the hardest, with almost all of their programmers (and many artists) having been laid off.
pushsquare.com/…/legendary-dev-id-software-allege…
It looks like Xbox management doesn’t see the point in id having their own engine anymore, which certainly is a decision.
I’m not sure what to think of future id games being based on Unreal (like Halo and everything else), which is the logical conclusion to this. So much of the studio’s identity is tied to their proprietary engines, which have always been industry-leading.
- Comment on Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Xbox: ‘We have to turn this into a sustainable business’ 3 months ago:
Sure, I don’t think the Xbox 5 will be a success, but it’s highly likely it’ll still ship far more units than the Gabecube, simply because Microsoft is able to shift more units as a larger organization with more presence everywhere (including in the retail space and online stores other than their own).
The difference is that for an organization the size and bloat of Microsoft, numbers that would make Gabe happy would be disastrous for them.
No consumer actually cares about minute differences in performance (or other aspects) between different operating systems and platforms. People buy the platform that has the games and meaningful features they seek, like for example portability, Nintendo’s second-strongest pull after their IPs. Microsoft is hastily trying to claw back their exclusives after a disastrous abandonment of this strategy, which sent margins down the drain. Yes, this will mean that they’ll continue serving the PC, so you can play most of their games on Valve’s devices or any other gaming PC as well, but once more: Normal people buy what’s on the front page on Amazon or on the most illuminated shelf at their local store.
The overwhelming majority don’t even configure their task bar, for crying out loud. Seeing an unmodified one with the big useless search box, spam widget, applications they are never using is one of the quickest reliable indicators that someone is not a tech person.
- Comment on Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Xbox: ‘We have to turn this into a sustainable business’ 3 months ago:
Look at sales of the Steam Deck compared to consoles and your prediction falls flat on its face. Sure, it would be nice in theory, but both the Deck and the Gabecube are very niche devices.
- Comment on Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Xbox: ‘We have to turn this into a sustainable business’ 3 months ago:
It was kind of neat in the beginning, at least in theory - and not just from a consumer perspective: Indies in particular benefited from it, since it raised awareness on their titles in addition to the big bucks from Microsoft coming in:
- Comment on Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Xbox: ‘We have to turn this into a sustainable business’ 3 months ago:
Based on everything I’ve read, Redfall was pretty much entirely on Arkane, just like, at EA, Anthem was on Bioware’s internal leadership, not publisher meddling. On the contrary, more publisher meddling would have likely made these disasters less likely.
- Comment on Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Xbox: ‘We have to turn this into a sustainable business’ 3 months ago:
Eh, both the Steam Deck and the Gabecube are far too niche and unknown for that. I’ve used the Steam Deck on public transportation and pretty much everyone assumed that it was a Nintendo Switch at first - and I had to go to great length to explain what it was.
One notable exception (out of a small handful) was a mother who recognized it as something different and asked me a ton of questions about it, because she wanted to reward her studious son (who sat next to us wide-eyed, with increasing levels of giddiness) for his great marks with it.